George Orwell would be appalled by the hypocrisy of online activism

George Orwell fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War (Photo: BBC)

What if Twitter had been around during the Spanish Civil War? Would George Orwell have journeyed to Catalonia to fight the fascists? Perhaps not. Judging by events in 2009, maybe "@GeorgeOrwell" would simply have tinged his avatar red and used the hashtag #spanishcivilwar to undermine his Nationalist enemy.

This year has been a good one for chubby armchair activists. They've found new outlets for their impotent do-goodery in social media. The use of Twitter during the Iranian post-election protests, for example, recently won a Webby Award (yes, really) for being "one of the top ten internet moments of the decade". Let me tell you why I find that deeply depressing.

There wasn't a revolution in Iran. There was only violently suppressed protest: death sentences and lengthy jail terms for opponents of the Mullahs' regime; young women raped and beaten in Tehran's darkest prisons; dormitories raided and ransacked at the country's universities; and long lists of missing men and women, many of them presumed dead and buried in mass graves. I've said it before and I'll say it again, to view that as a victory is as deluded as it is naive.

Did Twitter and other online networks threaten the brutal Islamist regime? Not this time. The Ahmadinejad-led dictatorship continues to thrive, backed by volunteer militias. And an Iranian democracy is no closer to reality than it was in January. So if the "Twitter revolution" was all the internet could muster in the last decade – and if it's something we're supposed to be proud of – then we may as well all log off in the New Year.

One of the errors of the Noughties has been to overestimate the internet's power to change the political world. The result of this error is overwhelmingly repellent: we are more aware than ever of the world's problems - but we have fooled ourselves into thinking that Tweets, Facebooks groups and other online tools will magically sort them out. They won't. It's dangerous, not to mention intolerably lazy, to think otherwise.

Even a tiny security flaw in the settings of one Facebook profile can compromise the security of many others. A study by two MIT students, reported in September, showed it is possible to predict a person’s sexual orientation by analysing their Facebook friends; bad news for those in regions where homosexuality carries the threat of beatings and prison. And many authoritarian regimes are turning to data-mining companies to help them identify troublemakers. TRS Technologies in China is one such company. It boasts that “thanks to our technology, the work of ten internet cops can now be done by just one.”

Morozov concludes, however, that "Western governments and NGOs shouldn't abandon their their push for digital democracy, they should just improve it". He's right (and I would encourage you to read the entire article). But I would emphasise his final point more than anything else: "In almost all countries run by authoritiarian regimes there is an untapped mass of activists, dissidents, and anti-government intellectuals who have barely heard of Facebook. Reaching out to these offline but effective networks will yield more more value than trying to badger bloggers to take up political activities… After all, these old-school types are the people who bought democracy to central and eastern Europe. And it will probably be them who win freedom for China and Iran too."

So next time an armchair activist tells you that his twibbon or his Facebook group will change the world, think again. Old-school methods might be helped by the internet, but ultimately free democracy occurs offline. No Webby award can rival it.